MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Spices’: An Indian Feminist ‘High Noon’

The Indian film “Spices” (at the Music Hall)--a simple, strong social melodrama that rivets your attention and burns your eyes--is set during recent colonial times, in a small lakeside village where fields of red chiles blaze and wave under an unremitting sun.

Just as the heat oppresses the villagers, so do the practices of the period: the rigid town hierarchy, the castes and social divisions, the patriarchal families and, finally, subjection to the colonial regime and the brutal whims of the local Subedar (tax inspector), who represents it.

When the Subedar (Haseeruddin Shah) decides that he wants to sleep with a local woman, he simply takes her. When one of the women, Sonbai (Smita Patil)--her husband off in Calcutta looking for work--refuses him, he will not accept it, his soldiers pursuing her to the gates of the spice factory where she works. And when those doors are locked to him--through the stubborn intercession of the elderly factory guard, Abu Mian (Om Puri)--the Subedar becomes enraged. At first, he squeezes the leaders economically--especially the spice factory’s owner, who has less mettle than his guard. Then he threatens to destroy the town.

The Subedar is a petulant, narcissistic, vicious man. But, though he’s a brute, he sees himself as a paragon of taste and an irresistible seducer. Shah plays him with the florid gestures of a silent-movie sheik. When he springs his seductions, his nostrils flare, his eyes bulge and he turns on his prized possession, a Victrola. This silly, preening sadist also commands a small detachment of soldiers. His is the voice of the government. And the village men, slowly, reluctantly, succumb to his will.

Sonbai alone is defiant, along with Abu Mian, the simple, pure man who protects her: a faithful servant who keeps his principles even when his employers abandon then. Puri gives him the slow, firm gestures of an arthritic saint, the glaring eyes of a devil. As the contest of wills stretches out, the heat pours down and the town edges, closer and closer, toward crisis.

“Spices” is something of a feminist “High Noon.” Like that classic 1952 Western, it presents an inevitable clash between unshakable wills during which the moral core of an entire population is gradually revealed--and it mostly eschews psychological subtlety for broad social strokes. The villagers tend to act en masse. They’re mostly types: the chattering, timid tradesmen; the stern but pragmatic Mukhi (Suresh Oberoi), who cannot understand why his wife will not accept his infidelities; the gossipy smirking layabouts and the outraged but frightened women workers.

Melodrama can always be criticized for crudities and exaggerations; “Spices” has more than a few. The humor is coarse, the colors searingly bright, the acting, Patil excepted, somewhat hammy. But, just as “High Noon” processed essential elements of the Western movie mythos into a progressive cry of outrage against conformity and social cowardice, the young writer-director, Ketan Mehta--an admirer of Brecht and Godard as well as Griffith and Chaplin--manipulates the grossly melodramatic forms of most second-rate Indian movies to nail his villains to the wall. The form of the film (Times-rated Mature for adult themes) is a trap, though it begins in a strange, fanciful mood that seems to mingle low-key naturalism with disturbingly broad farce.

At the end, Mehta abandons all naturalism and his style goes as baroque and overheated as Robert Aldrich in his later action movies. But Mehta’s graphic sense is lucid and passionate. He obviously burns with rage at the thought of the inspector’s injustice, and he communicates that rage with driving force.

And in the person of his leading actress, Smita Patil--who died in childbirth in 1986 shortly after making this film and who incarnated in her roles and off-screen life a progressive, idealistic stance--he gets an unexpectedly poignant and potent symbol of rebellion. When Sonbai defies the Subedar, she stands for every proud spirit that says, “No.” When the old guard defends her, he stands for every policeman who values justice above compromise. And when the door and hinges begin to shake before them, they stand for the fragile barriers that lie between humanity and license, free will and tyranny, courage and chaos.